


Fading In

by shopfront



Series: Barcoded Souls [1]
Category: Dark Angel
Genre: F/M, Post-Episode: s02e21 Freak Nation, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 05:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5653357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shopfront/pseuds/shopfront
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max was pretty convinced someone on high was laughing at her. It wasn't like anyone had time for pre-determined romance or Terminal City had come stocked with candle lit dinners.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fading In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aaronlisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaronlisa/gifts).



“I don't care what some delivery guy on the news tells you, they ain't right. Science experiments gone wrong are bad enough, but I am here to tell you that these monsters also don't have soulmarks!”

Max shook her head in disgust as the crowd murmured with morbid delight. Normal might have gotten a surprising amount of helpful air time with his 'no more than you or me' speech, but it didn't mean everyone was listening. She tugged at her hoodie and her sleeve, covering herself up further, and slipped towards the back of the group and welcoming darkness.

“They’re walking among us with those artificial marks on the back of their necks that don't match to another person. I ask you, how can something without a soulmark have a soul? How can someone without a soul be human? They are truly abominations!”

"Soulless, my arse," she muttered, clenching a fist and staring back towards the impromptu truck-as-stage. "Why I oughta-"

"And it is a lovely arse-," her earpiece crackled to life, "So how 'bout you let go of all that rage I just know you're fueling up with out there, and get it back here in one piece, yeah?"

"Alec-"

"One piece, Max."

After a long moment staring back at the jeering crowd, Max sighed and slipped into a side alley to wrestle with a large drain cover. 

Her radio crackled once more at the noise, making her roll her eyes. "That's my girl."

"Ain't your girl," she hissed back, rubbing at her wrist as she slipped into the drain and dragged her backpack in after her before pulled the grate back into position behind her. Her sleeve slipped back down as she did so, revealing faded looking and gently curving letters on her wrist in a flash of street light. _Alec_.

*

By the time Max made it back to Terminal City, the whole place seemed to be in an uproar -

"It's just another stupid thing for them to hold against us. If it's not this, it'll be something else."

"That's why we should figure out a way to show them! It might have been something that cult could spread around before to make us sound like less than human, but it isn't even true anymore! We should use that to our advantage _now_ , while there's still reporters camping out on our doorstep."

"You think anyone out there is even slightly interested in really listening to us? The sector cops would shoot on sight and they'd still get their story! Then they'd all just use our bodies to fake proof that we're faking them or something."

\- with transgenics standing around shouting at each other and waving arms and the occasional tail around in outrage.

"I see you weren't the only one monitoring my channel," Max observed with a frown, dumping her haul on a table. "Did you have to let it get so out of hand?"

"Come on now Max, do you really think my leadership qualities are strong enough to stop all of this?" Alec said with a smirk and a wave to the small but swelling crowd of people. He was swinging back and forth slightly on a half-broken office chair as he spoke, with his feet kicked up on the corner of the table and his toes nudging the bag she'd just dropped each time he shifted.

Max huffed and knocked his legs down as she passed him, tugging at her sleeve and ignoring the thump and loud complaint behind her. "Keep your disgusting feet away from our food."

"I'm hurt, that really stung," Alec called after her as she walked away. He probably had his hand held to his chest like some overblown pre-Pulse heroine or something. Not that she was going to give him the satisfaction of looking back.

Walking through camp, she grasped a few hands and smiled at a few new faces. More and more transgenics were emerging from all corners of Terminal City everyday, slowly creeping out of the shadows to join the larger group instead of staying isolated with only their own 'kind'. It was partly forced, as tighter border patrols reduced everyone's supplies, but it was still heartening.

Somewhere from in the hubbub, Joshua called out a greeting to her. She turned towards his voice, but by the time she located him his head was already bending back over his latest masterpiece. Sighing, Max started picking her way past people toward his little haven of art. She had paints in her pocket that needed delivering to him anyway.

"Is little fella angry with Alec?" Joshua asked when she reached him. She shrugged as she slipped in behind him, tugging at the draped cloth that could seal him off from the distractions of the group and resting her head on his shoulder. 

The painting looked good. Painted on a loose slab of what looked like a broken bit of wall propped up in the corner, it was a swirl of messy colours with no coherent form yet. Looking at it felt a little like being inside of her own head.

"Nah, it's not his fault we're all going stir crazy locked in here," she sighed.

"Max gets out, Max finds food, Max gets less tense. Others should find food, too. Might be less shouty."

"Just like old times huh, big fella. Me fetching things, you painting, everyone angry about something. Sure be nicer for all of us if they could go out, but the fence is under tighter watch than ever, you know that," Max said, wrapping an arm around him and holding him tight for a moment. "Still, it'd be good if Alec would bother to rein them in a little while I'm gone at least."

"Not Alec's fault he got shot and everyone wanted to see him on the boob tube, now he's stuck feeling shouty, too," Joshua said, finally turning soulfully disapproving eyes on Max. 

"Hey, don't look at me! I'm not the one that chose to photograph him but only do a bad artists impression of me, it's not my fault he's stuck here!"

Joshua shrugged and raised his paintbrush again. "Be nice. Getting his mark, making Alec cranky."

"Mark?" she asked, before her brain caught up with his words.

She felt herself go deathly still, and the painting blurred in her vision for a moment. She opened her mouth, and then closed it again. Her voice would probably shake and Joshua would definitely notice.

"Right here," Joshua said, thumping himself twice in the centre of his chest hard enough to make Max wince. "Still looks like old paint, too faint. Can't read it yet, gets impatient. Alec always impatient. Showing Joshua and getting shouty when Joshua can't see either."

Max couldn't seem to find her voice again around the lump in her throat, so she just hummed a little thoughtful noise and dug the paints out of her pocket. As hoped, they elicited a hug and an abruptly derailed conversation.

Joshua exclaimed with delight and fussed with them while she stood next to him in silence, watching him try to find some mysteriously perfect spot for them in his little pile of colours. It was getting lower again, she noticed. She'd have to keep an eye out on the next supply trip.

"Paint something nice with them, yeah? We could use a little nice around here right now," she eventually croaked out, patting him on the shoulder and stepping back to continue on her way.

"Little fella be nice to Alec, then," Joshua said reprovingly over his shoulder as she left even as he nodded in agreement, but Max could barely hear him over the rushing in her ears.

*

By day three after The Conversation with Joshua, as she'd started thinking of it in her head, Max was really starting to miss Original Cindy. Not that she didn't already. But this was fast becoming a whole new level of needing her boo around to talk to, and they definitely couldn't talk about this over video link in a crowded room.

If she was there, she'd probably have taken one look at Max trying and failing to hide away to think and called her a cat on a hot tin roof and laughed herself sick. But she wasn't. And without Cindy to tease the story out of her, Max was going mad just waiting around for something to happen.

She'd asked a few people about their own new marks. Her own mark had taken months to come in clear enough to read, and right up until the last possible moment she had just assumed it was more cryptic Minoan. 

But all the X's who had been freed when Manticore burned were saying the same thing: their marks were coming in fast. Two or three days for most, up to a week at the absolute outside. It was the same for some of the more exotic types who'd been deployed in combat here and there, like the X's had been deployed on their assassinations. Everyone else was still free of any kind of soulmate baggage so far, but it was starting to seem like it was only a matter of time.

Most were getting the first name chosen by another transgenic, a few more were getting designation numbers. Unsurprisingly, many had the jumbled blur that was believed to mean a soulmate had already passed away. Even a few had received unknown full names, though debate was fiercely divided on whether they belonged to non-transgenics or just those that hadn't found their way to Terminal City and had mentally assimilated the full names that made for better covers. Alec apparently still just thought of himself as Alec, but Max had a sneaking suspicion his mark was markedly larger than hers.

If Alec was as predictable as she always liked to mock him for being, his mark would be readable by now. Or at least close to. Yet he hadn't said anything about his mark to her or anyone except Joshua as far as she could tell. He also hadn't approached her in any unusual way, and hadn't even so much as looked at her funny.

If Joshua hadn't mentioned anything, she'd have had no idea...

But her rare moment of quiet in Terminal City didn't last long, and Max was quickly pulled from her thoughts by Gem's voice and the sound of a baby crying. Whether or not she might have figured it out without Joshua's gossiping quickly seemed immaterial again.

*

"Hey Max," Logan's voice was warm if strained, crackling over the connection as his tentatively smiling face kept freezing and dropping in and out. "I still can't get a good connection since the lockdown so we'll have to be quick-"

Even as one part of her brain fastidiously noted down particulars about supplies and surveillance patterns, part of her stood back and watched herself talking to this man she loved. Did love. Had loved. No, still loved... maybe.

She didn't even know anymore, how whack was that?

His smile wasn't as wide as the week before, or even as when he'd first slipped back through the drain systems across the border of Terminal City. He and Original Cindy had finally been forced back by the lingering toxins. All the transgenic blood transfusions in the world couldn't hold out hope against the accumulated sludge of Terminal City, even when you were a wanted man who needed such a hard to access hide away.

It was her fault he was upset, she knew it. They needed to talk. She'd meant to visit him during supply runs, however briefly, for a proper chat away from everyone where they could get some privacy. But then the fuzzy scratchings on her wrist became letters, not runes, and she'd just... put it off.

She'd put it off too long and Logan wasn't stupid. He was figuring out something was wrong. But what else could she do?

How do you tell someone over a potentially tapped and unreliable communications link, from a room that was always filled with people, that you were sorry. That you knew how it always felt as if the universe was keeping you both apart, and that, well, it turns out there was a good reason for that after all.

Sighing, she made her excuses as usual - that was, badly - and quit the call.

"Hey Max," came Alec's voice behind her, soft but clear as a bell and making her heart jump. Her body too, from the height of his eyebrows when she looked around. "... Everything alright?"

"Oh, you know, just preoccupied with plotting the revolution," she scoffed, trying to wave it off. Unsuccessfully, judging from Alec's searching look.

"Lemme know if you need anything," was all he said, though the exasperated expression she was so familiar with was creeping in at the corners. He clearly wanted to say much more than that.

She sat back for a minute, returning his searching look. Eventually he fidgeted under her gaze but still didn't speak, and so she stood, grinned, and whacked him hard on the shoulder.

"I will."

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays! I just couldn't resist when I saw your pairing request and soulmarks. This tried to run away from me and there wasn't enough time to get the full thing down so it's the start of a series, but hopefully this little segment is complete enough to be a satisfying little stocking stuffer.


End file.
